Coming from the Latin word for soul, anima, to animate is literally bringing something to life. In this blog post, we are discussing how to revive our character.
Considering our game, this topic is more than appropriate.

As stated in the very previous entry of this blog, The Inquisition is always listening, the major issue of the demo we released is the stillness of the combat. In particular, many have complained about the lack of animations.But what does animate actually mean?Coming from the Latin word for soul, anima, to animate is literally bringing something to life.

For the Sine Requie: SnakeEyes art style we decided to look at the Italian 800' and 900' paintings. With the aid of talented illustrators Giuseppe Di Girolamo and Salvo Lo Iacono, we created those beautiful detailed characters and backgrounds. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to move figures made in our art style.

However, animating something has more to do with giving it the appearance of life than to just move it. We, therefore, decided to make some research, looking at visual tricks from various media. In many shots from Japanese animated series, there is no actual character animation: the camera movement and a smart use of transitions gives the sense of dynamicity.

This happens in many games too. For example, a game we really are not inspired by Darkest Dungeon.

So, we changed the camera movements and the images treatment to convey the idea of a gory brawl.